Oh, first time hearing that term. Thank you, I love it!
Though I don't think this is at play here. Maybe a bit but seeing how my coworkers prompt, there is objective difference. I will spend half an hour on writing a good prompt, revise the implementation plan with the LLM multiple times before I allow it to even start doing anything while my coworkers just write "fix this" and wonder why the stupid AI can't read their minds.
I am producing AI slop as well, just hopefully a bit less. Obviously hand crafted code is still much better but my boss wants me to use "AI" so I do as I am told.
No, hoarding is accumulating for the sake of accumulating. A housing provider offers a service, 12 month leases on places to live temporarily. It is a cutthroat low margin business, very few people are truly getting rich being small time providers, most are just breaking even and banking on their asset appreciation.
It is a “service” that is way cheaper than owning a home, not everyone wants to be a homeowner and pay massive maintenance costs. That burden is handled by the provider.
Why is it cheaper than owning a home? Because landlords are driving up the price of homes by using an essential human right as speculative asset and investment class.
The burden is imposed by the "provider", as a result of their greed.
For my money Rachel Aviv is the best and most interesting writer currently on the New Yorker staff (give or take a David Grann, who is pretty much just writing books these days it seems). I go out of my way to read whatever has her byline.
> Now the question I ask is: how was it distilled? what chemicals were used in the process? are those chemicals safe? and a million other related questions. With regular pot there's none of that.
You absolutely should be asking those questions about “regular pot” as well. AIUI concentrates are among the bestselling and most profitable products in legal states, and they use uncertain chemicals of questionable provenance even if the delta-9 THC is 100% natty. But even if you’re just buying flower you could reasonably be concerned about pesticides or mold [1].
I think there are some quite good reasons to oppose cannabis legalization (for example, it’s made the super-high-potency concentrates which are associated with bad outcomes much more widely available) and it’s possible your own culture war or other biases are getting in your way here. But there are also lots of good arguments in favor of course.
This might prove too much, particularly for the case of literature. There were people writing commercially successful and culturally relevant literary fiction in 1970; back then you already had Austen and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Cervantes, plus Joyce and Woolf and Hemingway and Faulkner. I think there’s books published in the last 50 years that deserves a place on a short list of Best Novels, but I don’t think it has much overlap with the best-selling literary fiction being published at that time.
The FT is well worth reading (regardless of anyone’s personal beliefs, it’s useful to get a sense of how the wealthy and powerful think by reading their papers) but note that the FT Alphaville blog, which published this piece, is free to read if you create an account (you don’t need to pay).
This is not necessarily a paper read by the rich and powerful, but just by those in the finance industry/politics/academia/c-suites/board-members. It combines two key markets, objective no-nonense news pieces heavy with data and a light analysis (it's very good at separating the data from analysis/opinion) and also opinion pieces from high-influence people such as the top members of various governments, central banks and think tanks. You can read an opinion pieces from the heritage foundation, next to one written by the founders of just stop oil or other.
I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.
(To be clear, Berkshire could buy any of the bottom 476 companies in the index, not all of them. Also it’s probably closer to 400, because Berkshire has to keep some cash around to pay insurance claims and so on.)
reply